Racism, White Supremacy and..... Yoga?

Aside from the tragedy of what is happening with deportations right now, I find myself in a strange and sort of lovely mindspace. For one thing, I’ve gotten over the crisis moment and settled into practice. I keep thinking about the Buddhist mantra – chop wood, carry water. That’s what I’m doing right now. Working on my projects, focusing on what difference I can make. Trying to stay insulated enough from the big picture that it can’t get me down, can’t blunt the power of what I can try to do.

I also feel wonderfully full of ideas, of inspiration, and great relationships with great people. Yesterday Mo and I went to a screening of the documentary 53206, which is about how mass incarceration plays out in the zip code with the highest rate of incarceration of black men in the world. It is a neighborhood about a mile from where I live. It was kind of shocking to see so many familiar images - buildings, people, urban life. The documentary was heavy and full of tragedy, but the experience of seeing it - together with a roomful of mostly white middle class people who are inspired, as I am, by what is happening in our country right now to get out of their comfort zones and learn something - was kind of beautiful.  Curiosity and connectedness feel like important antidotes to the hatred and forced disconnection we're seeing in our world.  

Meanwhile, this week I’m in California with an inspiring group of community and labor leaders, working on strengthening our leadership and our organizations. It is one of the luckiest things about my job that I get to be part of this program. I just arrived at our retreat location and in the hour I had to wait for my room to be ready I already felt deeply gratified to see new friends and heroes, and to talk a little bit about how each of us is experiencing this moment and what we’re trying to do to step into it. It’s a reminder of how much being in community matters.

Aside from all of that, I’ve been reading a lot about race these past few weeks. You can’t be concerned about social justice, about building a more equitable world, without be preoccupied with race and how it structures access to power and resources in our country, so it’s not like it’s ever that far from my mind. But the combination of some things I’m working on at work and the ongoing drive to understand what happened in this election is putting a different context around my current reading.

For a couple of weeks, I’ve been working my way through White Trash (Nancy Isenberg). It’s a weighty tome with extensive research and documentation. But I think I can summarize the main ideas:

• The myth of the founding of our country is that British and European people came here seeking freedom, especially religious freedom. But in reality, many poor white people came here in deeply exploitative circumstances. They came as indentured servants or forced laborers. Convicts and orphans were basically exported here to work the land and test the hypothesis that this country could yield great wealth if developed. Rich people and corporate interests retained the wealth. Poor white people, along with African slaves, contributed the labor. And for the most part, people didn’t care much if poor whites or slaves died in the process. We were all seen as throwaway people – if we survived, great. If not, no big deal.
• Poor whites and African Americans have a lot more in common than we have ever realized or ever built on. Both groups have been exploited and subjugated. But rarely have our two communities united to fight back together. In fact, policies and cultural norms have been put into place expressly to prevent that unity, because it would pose such a powerful threat to the established order.
• Poor whites have basically been marginalized and shamed in the larger white culture, and that’s part of why we have seen the emergence of celebrated redneck culture in the past 20 years or so. Poor(er) white communities are reclaiming some version of their identity and insisting on its validity. Unfortunately, at least some of that reclaiming is increasing and strengthening racial divides. 
• There's also a whole chapter about Andrew Jackson that reminded me of DJT, and the fact that we have been here before. Here, in this country. Not just in nazi germany. We need to learn from our own history.

My editorial comment: if we could figure out how to reclaim poor white-ness without alienating or erasing black peoples’ experiences in this country, we could do a lot to build a more just world.

I relate to the project of reclaiming poor white-ness. I now live a solidly middle class life. If anything, I have all the trappings of wealth (except for the actual wealth) – I travel often and widely, I have intellectual credentials, I move in the world of knowledge and ideas. But I didn’t grow up that way and I am frequently reminded of it. I grew up eating spam and hamburger helper, and sometimes the foodie culture that has overtaken the middle class alienates me. I grew up in a world where people's labor was hard and physical, and no one got paid for one minute that they weren’t actually at work. So sometimes living in a world where sit a computer all day, where they have a salary and can predict what they'll get paid, where they take long and robust vacations and meanwhile complain about how stressful their jobs are feels very weird, and not exactly right.

I find myself sometimes crashing up against peoples’ perceptions of who I am, and assuming a commonality that doesn’t exist. I’m not the same as other people I encounter in my adult life who might have the same situation I have now, but grew up in middle or upper class comfort and experience all of this with a very different frame. I don’t think of myself as a redneck, but I understand how poor white people trying to reclaim the redneck culture are responding to being made to feel ashamed of how they grew up.

Of course, lots of showcasing of various versions of poor white culture is still fake and is still to make money for rich corporate interests, a la the Duck Dynasty folks, who are extremely wealthy but play at poverty and get even richer while doing it.

For the vast majority of us, the founding of our country and the enumeration of rights in our constitution were not meant for us. We were meant to be mechanisms for wealth and rights accumulation for other people. Even our woefully inadequate and incomplete democracy is such an unlikely thing. It was founded on such a small, thin premise of rights and equality for a very small group of people. And together, we have worked to expand it, to make its reality more closely live up to its promise.

We have a long way to go to fully realize that promise. And figuring out how we accept that empowering communities of color doesn’t mean giving up our own tiny amount of power is a big part of that.

There’s more, but I’m going to save some of the book report for another day.

One of the reasons I haven’t written much about this yet is because I haven’t figured out how yoga relates. Of course, I believe deeply that yoga gives us tools and strategies for confronting unjust power. But it is not exactly obvious how it helps, aside from the basic methodology of how to live a good life. I would like to say yoga comments on race, but I don’t know if it does. In fact, yoga is not inherently a method for challenging unjust power.  Yoga studios in the west are full of students who are not necessarily challenging unjust power. Yoga as a practice in the west is completely caught up with consumerist and exploitative culture – see, for example, how much money is made marketing yoga clothes and props and expensive vacations, and how little money is expended using yoga to tackle injustice.

The established practice of yoga in India for hundreds of years has coexisted with the caste system.  But that doesn’t mean the underlying teachings of yoga don’t tell us something about challenging unjust power – we just might not ask the right questions or apply their answers skillfully.

I’m still working on that. Anyone reading this blog who has an opinion about how yoga teaches us to unlearn racism and dismantle white supremacy? Please comment! Let’s work on it together. I’m doing a couple of projects at work that involve staging conversations with (mostly white) union members about race and racism, so I’m going to be thinking about this a lot over the coming year. 

If you read my blog, I hope you’re figuring out a way to be part of the bigger project in your own life. This is the mandate for us - if you are unhappy about the results of the election, you have to be willing to dig in on race. Because we completely misunderstood how race, racism and white supremacy were working. And if we don't understand it better, we'll keep helping to create a world we don't want to live in.

With love, gratitude and solidarity.